The Bad Kids of Black Heaven: Where's The Orchestra? Part Two

Beginning with a split second of the very end of the previous scene: The Senator and his wife, Hadassah sleeping soundly as an earthquake violently rattles their Florida hotel room.

A news report on the freeway shooting of German tourists with stereotypically scary sketches of young black gang members.

Images from a movie from the 1970s with zombified versions of Nazi soldiers emerging from the waves of a Florida beach, to the horrified reactions elderly beach goers. (Also apparently filmed on a day much too cold for beach going.)

Abruptly Cut To Title Card accompanied by silence:

"Studies show that people who are somewhat depressed predicted the future better than those who are happy and well adjusted."

This is still Florida but somewhere away from The Senator.

Here is The Actress, on a movie set. In her early twenties but preternaturally hardened and aged, wearing the body-marked fatigue of mass awareness, the waking terror of fame, and the sublimated soullessness of having maintained a commitment to her goal. But what do any of us know about being that one and a million?

A crew makes painstaking and minute adjustments to the cinema lighting of a 1970s newsroom. A period piece, a bio-pic of the life of deceased Sarasota affiliate newscaster Christine Chubbock, who famously shot herself live on the air one Sunday morning in 1974. Footage of the incident was destroyed, has been sought after for years from collectors of rare video, and the entire basis for this feature film pivots around an exacting recreation of the event.

The 21st century Actress is playing the late Christine Chubbock and is getting made up to look like a newscaster from the era. The personal style and fashion sense exhibited in the ongoing spectacle of The Actress’ day-to-day has been commented on, by both celebrity journalists and academic celebrity theorists, as an updated version of the Dionysian fashions of the1970s, mixed with the timelessness of leather jacket archetypes amidst a haze of smoke. It was once said that fashions become out of fashion before returning later but in the accelerated age it has been found that nothing ever truly goes away, it’s all simultaneously present and waiting to be drawn from but this itself isn’t a facet of the time, it’s a consequence of the obliteration of all taste. Remaining only are the funhouse mirror reflections of the idea of a fashion specific to the current period.

What adds to The Actress’ allure in much of the public’s imagination isn’t solely due to the Dionysian look expressed in her fashion sense, seen primarily through the hurried and inebriated exits in and out of clubs and restraints captured in shaky hand held paparazzo cameras, but mostly the leather jacket archetype’s malleability into other appearances. Sometimes The Actress will have short hair, blonde hair, and more oddly thick glasses and shabby sweater (specifically utilized when The Actress is pontificating in interviews on the philosophical underpinnings of dramatizing the late suicidal newscaster’s final days); always the look in the shadow of another look, the fantasy of an absent self.

The look and its shadow define The Actress’ entrance into prior to the days of her own self-directed spectacle of drug and alcohol addiction rumors and minor arrests. The child of an Older Actress, a now aging former cover girl and star of comedic fluff who manifests a severe and medicated neuroses partly related to the lack of prestige associated with her reputation as an artist but primarily a consequence of the unreality being that one in a million. The Actress was introduced to the world as both a child and peer of her mother. While the daughter lived directly under the harsh light of the narcissistic fantasy of multitudes, her mother manifested a separate fantasy for aging women in the celebrity news narrative of being her daughter’s peer.

It is believed by The Director that casting this actress to portray Christine Chubbock will add poignance to the impending suicide death that frames the narrative, given that The Actress’ reputation for glamorously self-destructive behavior has made her a constant in office death pools for the last couple of years. References are made to famous beauties of the past that have also dies young and there is a shared excitement of potentially witnessing a similar scenario in real present-tense time. There is a faint glittery shine around many see around The Actress’ outline, a Black Heaven which in technical terms is the by-product of premature necrophilia.

So right now, the newsroom set is being prepared and The Actress is in her trailer with friends and assistants. She is practicing the voice, an affected version of Christine Chubbock's own voice, which she studies from videotape. The voice is an exaggerated low moan, Ms. Chubbock was depressed in her final days, reportedly over her fears of always being single and remaining alone. The Actress' impersonation progressively takes on the garish quality of broad characture but not that of a skilled performer, it's a crude gesture encouraged by the group of friends and assistants around her, everything she does with the intent of being the funny is met with agreeable laughter from the lower hierarchy of her circle. She laughs along with their laughter, encouraged she goes even further.

The laughter in repetitive echoes carries over to the next scene.

The Senator, early morning on the highway, examining the wreckage of the car in which the German tourists were gunned down. A psychic investigation, assisting police and other Floridian authorities. Their bodies removed, all that remains is a rental car with such an absurd amount of bullet holes, such that the exterior of the vehicle resembles some sort of modern art design. The Senator runs his hand slowly across pieces of the car's interior, torn material with jagged edges. His fingers touch the sharp edges lightly, eyes closed, he resists the urge to visually recreate the horror of the shooting in his mind and observes the gravity.

The laughter made by The Actress and her people in a small comfortable room continues to echo at this awful scene. The Senator seems to be the only one hearing it. The police and other Floridian authorities confusedly observe The Senator as he wanders away from the vehicle as though in a trance. Staring at the sky again (but this time, not in order to hear Hadassah) and looking past the wide plain next to the stretch of highway, The Senator is hearing the laughter and looking toward its source in the unknown distance. Laughter always overlaps with cruelty but their are two kinds of cruelty: One is a timeless element of earth and humanity, without it love wouldn't exist and vice versa. But then there's this other kind...

Florida: Where's The Orchestra? Part One

Just above a whisper..."Hadassah...Hadassah.......Hadassah"A small figure on the shoreline. It's comedian Gilbert Gottfried, portraying a politician (The Senator) in a three-piece-suit slightly too large for his small frame.

The Senator approaches the shore of the Gulf Coast holding his cell phone, he tells his staff that he's seeking a better signal but he really wants to speak to his wife alone as he evades them while walking into the waves, ruining his pants and increasing their professionals' disconcert.

The Senator examines the sky and shoreline, where they meet as one wall. Her voice tiny in his ear but filling up that sky. The terrifying infinity of space and possibility. Haddasah's faith nullifies the terror of possibility, Those endless possibilities of the secular age. He always says her name the same way, as if struck, haunted, and especially when the sky clears.

Returning from the water, surrounded by the assemblage of his staff, revolving around him, speaking and moving at a different frame rate. The Senator's smile is resilient but slightly pained by sunlight, but it looks that way under clouds too... as we'll discover.

The heat makes illusionary tremors out of the horizon lines in the distance but there have been actual earthquakes in Florida lately. Maybe this explains the jittery nature of The Senator's staff, natural phenomena uncommon to the territory named after Easter has expanded naked possibility fraught with the fearful imagination of a collective.

Also happening lately, the shooting murders of German tourists by black suspects on Floridian highways, everything is feeding into everything else in these strange times. The Senator is heading the one man exploratory committee following these unnatural events due to his peculiar sensitivity in these type of matters; it seems that every one of his colleagues has a story about his capacity for surprising clairvoyances. Small things mostly, he once located the missing house keys of his Senatorial colleague from South Carolina, but remarkable nonetheless to any and all observers bound by the normal sensory limitations.

Later on at a press conference, strobing flashbulbs and reporters questions shouted with urgency. The Senator's voice, seemingly designed for maximum annoyance is self-consciously restrained here as in all of the his public appearances, a performative austerity, but one always wonders what he this voice sounds like in full panicky fright mode and unbound at night like a Jewish Werewolf. This is the true undercurrent of The Senator's unpopularity with many of his colleagues and the media: a formal unflappability of manner. Sure, there is the overly nuanced balancing act of his lengthy explanations (The Senator is a master of this "jazz neutrality"), his stereotypically politician transgressions and triangulations from and refusal of acknowledgement of what's plain-as-day-true to everyone else, that is the content which justifies the fists pounded on tables in frustration but the voice...the voice completes this perfect impetus for vexed hair-pulling.

The balancing act, the neutrality and triangulations, these are the byproducts of the Visions, the burden carried and worn by the seer. An elaborate path toward the right thing is being followed and its unexplainable by The Senator because it's beyond words, even beyond vision because the Visions are not literal visions. People overlook this imperfect nature of the prophet, who wears this burden with a shuffling hunched sloppiness, visions are not answers but attacks that lead its victims with not even directions but on a path seeking directions.

The press conference over, The Senator smiles, recording devices shut off violently and pencils stab sentence ending periods onto note pads in frustration. He's said nothing but he's made revelations seem as though forthcoming in the immediate; his gifts are not salesmanesque but he manages this illusion of nearness and farness impossibly through the prolonged static of outwardly flat and neutral execution.

At nighttime, The Senator climbs into a hotel bed with his already sleeping wife. Incidentally, he always sleeps in his suit when not on holiday out of a long gestating superstition. She resembles sea-turtle passivity in these unguarded moments and he drapes an arm across her body, an awkwardly placed hug intended to keep her slumber undisturbed. The Senator recounts his day in an anemic whine with therapy session honesty into her ear. Hadassah jolts unconsciously, moans monosyllables and The Senator nods a serenely felt understanding before reaching his own restful surrender.

He. She. Asleep. And his ongoing psychic investigation will have to resume the next morning as they both maintain their stillness as the next massive earthquake begins. The slow rising falling of their bodies in breaths, comforting to watch from above with God's eye, though inexplicable as the entire room vibrates with violent rattles.